Peace of Mind (Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 2.0 WDH1U10000 1 TB)

Member Name: upton66

Product:	Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 2.0 WDH1U10000 1 TB
Date:	22/08/09 (28 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy plug & play

Disadvantages: None

Since first getting a digital camera I've become somewhat paranoid about how to safely store all my cherished and irreplaceable photos. Knowing how temperamental the average pc is, it is inevitable that one day you will turn it on and be presented with the dreaded blue screen and with no way of accessing your files.

My answer to my worries was to discover the Western Digital My Book. I bought a 1TB unit, 1 Terabyte, which is 1,000 gigabytes. This will take some filling up, or you would think so.

Whilst I know it still relies on a spinning disc but at least it is stand-alone from the pc. You can plug it into any old pc through an usb and all being well all your files will be there. Note though I do still make copies of my photos on disk as well. Some would say I should still have a backup of the backup, but you could argue that in-finitum.

The MyBook is a neat, shiny black little box with a comforting blue light on the front. It stands on its side, about 16in high, 5in deep and 2in fat and I leave it tucked behind the screen. It has just a mains lead and an usb connection. The mains lead ends in a lightweight combined transformer/plug and is supplied with a decent length usb cable and I connect it to one of those inaccessible usb sockets in the back of the pc.

Being shiny and plastic is does tend to attract the dust, so when I remember I stick the nozzle of the hoover over the ventilation grills.

It is as good as silent when compared to the background hum of my pc. It never seems to get even warm, so ventilation must be good.

Files are read and written almost as rapidly as they are to my hard drive so I can almost instantly move and copy files between drives and folders without any irritating waiting around.

This machine is absolute idiot-proof plug and play. Plug in the usb to the pc and the new external drive is recognised and ready to use. When you shut down the pc the gadget also turns off, and instantly comes alive again when you boot up.

Use it like any other drive, make your own directories and organize your files as you wish. We have three wireless networked computers in the house and I've made selected directories shared so the rest of the family also have access to their own backup drives whenever the main pc is turned on.

Note that the unit is not designed to be portable so don't be tempted to take it to friends or on holiday,

This gadget is real peace of mind and simplicity itself. I may well be getting another one, as I am now saving high definition video files which are massive and starting to eat into my mere 1000,000,000,000 bytes of storage space!

Summary: Just great simplicity

Processing/Quality:
Reliability:
Noise: